RTP is central to three counties--Wake (Raleigh, Cary), Durham, and Orange (Chapel Hill). There are a lot of good public schools, but it depends a lot on which county and city you live in. And of course school district has a big impact on housing costs. There are also a number of charter schools, where enrollment is usually based on a lottery.
As a place to work, there are plenty of good software jobs in the area. I would group in not just RTP but also downtown Raleigh and Durham. As an employer, it's difficult to find enough developers to fill roles. There are technology hubs all up and down the east coast (Atlanta, DC, Richmond, etc.) which RTP competes with for talent.
I work as a software developer in RTP, and I really like it. (I'm in the Microsoft office, which by the way is hiring.)
School districts can vary. I live in Chapel Hill, which has truly excellent schools. Durham can be hit or miss, and I don't know much about the Eastern triangle like Morrisville, Cary or Raleigh.
Other nice things about the area are that the food is generally really good, and it's easy to take a weekend trip to either the mountains or the coast, if you like that.
One downside is that there are lots of software engineering jobs, but the big internet companies for the most part aren't here, except for a small Google office in Chapel Hill and the Microsoft office, which is also fairly small. It was worth it for me to leave Google to live here, but YMMV.
I'd be happy to answer more questions if you have any.
Thank you for your response. This is one of the reasons I come to HN, you were very helpful. Just curious, what sort of work/tech stack is Microsoft doing/using in RTP? What levels are they looking to hire?
The office is for Azure DevOps, our source code hosting / work item tracking / CI / CD / package hosting solution. I think we are looking to hire software engineers and senior software engineers, but if those titles don't fit you, I would say apply anyway. I personally would rather have a great person than the right title, and I suspect a lot of us feel the same.
Feel free to email me if you have any more questions about Microsoft or the RTP area.
Decent area, incomes are good by non bay-area standards, and the cost of living is extremely low. There are a lot of software jobs but most of them are unexciting. Traffic isn't too bad as long as you work and live in the same general part of RTP. The food is decent if you are into barbecue and southern hipster, but the ethnic options besides Indian are a bit weak. There's a lot happening but if you're into fringe stuff it's a bit slow.
Don't have kids but people who do have told me Raleigh and Chapel Hill have decent school districts but Durham should be avoided. Ironically I think Durham is the most interesting part of the RTP area.
+1 that Durham is the most interesting part of the RTP. Having lived in Durham, Raleigh, Cary, Morrisville, and Chapel Hill over the years, I liked Durham the best. But like a lot of cities, gentrification is causing a lot of social and cultural upheaval in Durham and the surrounding suburbs.
I grew up in Raleigh. Started at a run of the mill public school, then went into the gifted and talented program in the public schools, then went to private school in Cary. I've heard pretty good things about Chapel Hill. By reputation, Raleigh probably has the public schools unless you count the school of science & math in Durham. Cary is on the up and up but as a city it's just about the most boring picture of suburbia you can possibly imagine.
One thing I'll say about the gifted and talented public school programs in Raleigh-- although hopefully this is becoming less severe over time but probably not--is that it's basically a weird fucking race and class war. The public schools in the wealthy neighborhoods are not actually very good. The G&T programs are embedded inside predominately black public schools in what's more or less still the hood (was very much so when I was a kid). The bus picks you up in your expensive neighborhood, stops several times in progressively poorer neighborhoods, and then lets out at school in the hood where you have these white islands of G&T classrooms inside black schools. The tension (and occasionally violence) is REAL. But the schooling is good if you're lucky enough to make it into those programs.
